Item — HN Reader

> In fact, the Northwest Seaport Alliance … said it was so far seeing more vessels call into port in 2025 than in 2024, with three more calls in the first quarter of 2025 than during the same period in 2024.

> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated

And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction

5 comments

Perfect use of treacherous waters. Kudos.

Not the first time their headline has been at odds with their content. I've never really been a fan of this particular outlet, even in their early days I found their self-absorbed writing style insufferable. They strike me as pedantic rather than informative.

Not really, the claim was „the port is empty“, not „the ships arriving are empty“. If there are still ships arriving, the claim is false.

Most of what comprises a port is infrastructure for handling containers and bulk cargo. If cargo volumes are down, some fraction of that infrastructure is disused, or used below its capacity. That a ship was at berth is cold comfort to the longshoremen, truck drivers, etc. who expected to work that cargo, nevermind to the people that expected to, y’know, purchase and consume those goods.

Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.

> But it’s in the ballpark

It is not remotely in the ballpark. The word “empty” is not understood to mean “70% full” anywhere in the English-speaking world.

There are websites that provide tracking for a lot of ships.

For comparison here's Tilbury, near London in the UK: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=GBTIL001 you'll note that big cargo vessels are shown in yellow.

And here's the port of Seattle: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=USSEA001 You'll note a distinct lack of yellow. If you zoom out a bit you can find some 'bulk carriers' but those aren't container ships.

So when the article quotes the Seattle port commissioner who says "we currently have no container ships at berth" that might be literally true right now at that specific port.

Other US ports seem to be doing better - Perhaps Seattle is badly located or expensive, and has taken a disproportionate fraction of the 30% drop in volumes? There are certainly larger ports on the same coast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_container_ports_...

One sets off for a morning drive on Thanksgiving. Upon entering the freeway, they find the normally traffic-congested road smooth and free-flowing. The journey takes a little more than half the time it usually would. They exclaim "Wow, the roads are empty this morning!"

I'm playing a bit of devils advocate, but it's not inconsistent to observe a typically congested resource X operating at a fraction of its capacity, and note the observation with "wow, X is _empty_".

And if you’re snopes and the claim you’re checking is „the road is empty“, you would rate it as true?

That's why it's just "mostly" false, but 'empty' is a word with a specific meaning, and claim here was that the port is literally empty of ships. (or, in the case of the Twitter message they show, that there's only one single ship in the harbor)

The claim was "at this moment right now, the port is empty". The article then talks about 35% drop of "shipments" and "imports".

Snopes has been pwnd. It now adheres to the standard of literal truth with a political bias. So if someone posts “Bernie Sanders has 30,000 at a rally” (true) but the image is of a different (also true) rally but on a different date, then Snopes just says “it’s false”. Not “true, but the image is wrong”. Not informative, like “Bernie did have 30,000 people attend but this image is from XYZ”. Just says FALSE! Same here.

They've always seemed informative and do a good job of showing their sources. How big a deal is the single-word true/false judgement for an ambiguous claim if all the relevant details are summarized?

They weren’t.

Is this [0] the Snopes article you were talking about, on the Bernie Sander rally?

They rate it "mostly true" and in the summary mentioned the true attendance and the false photo, just like you said they should have.

I don't get what you are saying. They seem on the ball.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/27000-people-came-to-a-ber...

If I drink 30% of a glass of water, is the glass of water empty?

No, but if the claim is that the glass no longer has any boba it's irrelevant how much liquid you drink.

The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.

Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.

These aren’t static systems.

Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.

And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.

> These aren’t static systems.

That is irrelevant.

If I drink 30% less water overall, I’d be pretty unhealthy.

That is irrelevant. The question was weather or not the ports can be considered empty if some ships are up to 30% empty, which is not the case. Emptiness can be more encompassing than 0% (there is still some residual water in an “empty” glass of water), but it isn’t so expansive as to range from >0% to 70%.

You’re speaking about technicalities. There shouldn’t be any argument that our economy will continue to be fucked by tariffs and supply issues. 30 percent is massive.

It's not a technicality, it's literally what the claim was: "Seattle's marine cargo terminals were empty and international vessels had stopped calling into the port as of April 29, 2025, due to the U.S.'s newly imposed tariffs."

The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.

We’re sitting here arguing about the obviously incorrect title and America is burning, so we are speaking about the wrong thing. It’s irrelevant whether it’s 70 or 0 percent, we’re still fucked. Discussing the issue of 70 vs 0 percent isn’t going to solve how fucked we are, so it’s a technicality.

> America is burning

Please take it back to Reddit.

Do you not see how „the port isn’t empty“ and „there will be a massive impact on the economy“ aren’t mutually exclusive? The argument isn’t that the tariffs are a good idea, it’s just about the snopes rating.

"Technicalities?" 70% does not round to 0%. That's not a "technicality," that is a blatant misrepresentation.

If a boy was watching the sheep, saw a wolf, and cried "Dragon! Dragon!" and then the king and his army came to fight the dragon, and when he was criticized for lying, he said, "You're talking in technicalities, there was indeed a wolf," that is what this feels like to me. But then if he refused to ever call the wolf a wolf, and this happened over and over again, and he always called it a dragon--well, a lot of people would just ignore him.

Like, why not just say "Yeah, it's not true. Not sure what this guy's agenda is, but easily-disproved exaggeration doesn't help make the case. There IS a problem though, and let's try to have that conversation while ignoring obvious alarmism." You would sound reasonable and mature, and possibly even convincing.

Thr 35% was the port of LA not Seattle which was a single point in time report saying no container ships are in Seattle at the moment and usually are.

its closer to empty than before you drank